U.S. Appellate Court Affirms Extraterritorial Laundering Conviction of Lawyer

On February 20, 2001, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of a U.S. attorney charged with money laundering notwithstanding that most of the acts occurred outside the U.S. Michael Tarkoff, a criminal defense lawyer, represented Ismael Arnaiz, who was a target of a grand jury investigation of a scheme in which Arnaiz and his business partner, Akioshi Yamada, defrauded Medicare. They paid people to recruit sham patients to visit their medical clinics and provide their Medicare numbers to the billing clerk. Thereafter the clinics would bill Medicare for medical services that either had not been provided to the sham patients, or if provided, were not required. The clinics fraudulently billed Medicare $120 million during a two-and-one-half year period.